IT as a Service

IT as a Service (ITaaS) covers private clouds, hybrid clouds, and on-premises clouds, as well as cloud management, including performance management offerings used to create and manage these entities. Consider this IT consumption as a utility. (Read More)(Read Less)

This topic explores Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) private and hybrid cloud offerings, Platform as a Service (PaaS) private and hybrid cloud offerings, and Software as a Service (SaaS). It also investigates emerging areas such as Desktop as a Service (DaaS), Storage as a Service, and Applications as a Service.

The key areas covered include enterprise applications and use cases that are appropriate for private and hybrid clouds, and how consumers and vendors should select cloud management offerings they will use to manage the various types of cloud services and the journey to the cloud: from A to Z and all points between.

A new generation of private cloud environments is being created now, ones where all the management is done via SaaS. This way, the heavy lifting is done by others, and you inherit an IT as a Service environment ready for you to add new workloads without worrying too much about upgrades, management constructs, or even, in some cases, security controls. It is all done for you. For many companies, this is one way to transform to an on-premises cloud and then to a hybrid cloud. There is a growing list of players; however, the first out the door are ZeroStack, Platform9, and SkySecure from Skyport Systems.

Container technologies and developers work with applications. End users use applications. Yet, administrators think about the systems that make up the applications with tools that are not application-centric but rather system-, VM-, or container-focused. Because the tools are not focused on the application, the definition of the application is unknown by those who support the application. This is in serious need of changing. In fact, until this changes, a business cannot transform into the next generation of cloud-native applications. It just will not be ready. So, then, how do we get ready?

The announcements keep coming thick and fast from the behemoth that is EMC Federation, the seven-headed hydra beast. In a not too unexpected announcement, VMware is to pseudo–spin out its vCloud Air division and move it into Virtustream, the latest Federation member, which EMC bought earlier this year for $1.2 billion.

There is a huge disconnect between the DevOps world and most current enterprise IT organizations. One element in the gap is that developers do not want to know about infrastructure. Another is that the operations team does not trust developers to make changes to the production infrastructure. Developers want to focus on their application and the value it delivers to the organization. Developers want to know the characteristics of the infrastructure but do not want to build it or operate it. As a result, DevOps does not mean the end of the operations team. In fact, I see the reverse as being essential. The operations team is absolutely critical to the success of DevOps methodologies. The developers must be able to trust that the infrastructure has specific characteristics: characteristics like performance, connectivity, availability, and uniformity. To enable this trust, I believe that the operations teams are going to need to become more like developers. I call this OpsDev.

In this ever-changing world of IT, the legacy of today was once the future of yesterday: namely, hypervisors. Hypervisors are now considered legacy, even though they are seriously underutilized due to issues with fear, uncertainty, and doubt around using these resources to their fullest. The new technology is containers. However, where are the operational tools to support containers? Where are the procedures? Where are the developers who understand distributed systems? We are moving toward containers at lightning speed without answers to those questions and many more. To move to containers today, we need a strategy.